The question is natural, but the remedy suggested is futile. It is not easy to exaggerate the extent to which we now pass from one kind of nurture to another as we go from business to church, from science to the newspaper, from business to art, from companionship to politics, from home to school. An individual is now subjected to many conflicting schemes of education. Hence habits are divided against one another, personality is disrupted, the scheme of conduct is confused and disintegrated. But the remedy lies in the development of a new morale which can be attained only as released impulses are intelligently employed to form harmonious habits adapted to one another in a new situation. A laxity due to decadence of old habits cannot be corrected by exhortations to restore old habits in their former rigidity. Even though it were abstractly desirable it is impossible. And it is not desirable because the inflexibility of old habits is precisely the chief cause of their decay and disintegration. Plaintive lamentations at the prevalence of change and abstract appeals for restoration of senile authority are signs of personal feebleness, of inability to cope with change. It is a "defense reaction."
V
We may sum up the discussion in a few generalized statements. In the first place, it is unscientific to try to restrict original activities to a definite number of sharply demarcated classes of instincts. And the practical result of this attempt is injurious. To classify is, indeed, as useful as it is natural. The indefinite multitude of particular and changing events is met by the mind with acts of defining, inventorying and listing, reducing to common heads and tying up in bunches. But these acts like other intelligent acts are performed for a purpose, and the accomplishment of purpose is their only justification. Speaking generally, the purpose is to facilitate our dealings with unique individuals and changing events. When we assume that our clefts and bunches represent fixed separations and collections in rerum natura, we obstruct rather than aid our transactions with things. We are guilty of a presumption which nature promptly punishes. We are rendered incompetent to deal effectively with the delicacies and novelties of nature and life. Our thought is hard where facts are mobile; bunched and chunky where events are fluid, dissolving.
The tendency to forget the office of distinctions and classifications, and to take them as marking things in themselves, is the current fallacy of scientific specialism. It is one of the conspicuous traits of highbrowism, the essence of false abstractionism. This attitude which once flourished in physical science now governs theorizing about human nature. Man has been resolved into a definite collection of primary instincts which may be numbered, catalogued and exhaustively described one by one. Theorists differ only or chiefly as to their number and ranking. Some say one, self-love; some two, egoism and altruism; some three, greed, fear and glory; while today writers of a more empirical turn run the number up to fifty and sixty. But in fact there are as many specific reactions to differing stimulating conditions as there is time for, and our lists are only classifications for a purpose.
One of the great evils of this artificial simplification is its influence upon social science. Complicated provinces of life have been assigned to the jurisdiction of some special instinct or group of instincts, which has reigned despotically with the usual consequences of despotism. Politics has replaced religion as the set of phenomena based upon fear; or after having been the fruit of a special Aristotelian political faculty, has become the necessary condition of restraining man's self-seeking impulse. All sociological facts are disposed of in a few fat volumes as products of imitation and invention, or of cooperation and conflict. Ethics rest upon sympathy, pity, benevolence. Economics is the science of phenomena due to one love and one aversion—gain and labor. It is surprising that men can engage in these enterprises without being reminded of their exact similarity to natural science before scientific method was discovered in the seventeenth century. Just now another simplification is current. All instincts go back to the sexual, so that cherchez la femme (under multitudinous symbolic disguises) is the last word of science with respect to the analysis of conduct.
Some sophisticated simplifications which once had great influence are now chiefly matters of historic moment. Even so they are instructive. They show how social conditions put a heavy load on certain tendencies, so that in the end an acquired disposition is treated as if it were an original, and almost the only original activity. Consider, for example, the burden of causal power placed by Hobbes upon the reaction of fear. To a man living with reasonable security and comfort today, Hobbes' pervasive consciousness of fear seems like the idiosyncrasy of an abnormally timid temperament. But a survey of the conditions of his own time, of the disorders which bred general distrust and antagonism, which led to brutal swashbuckling and disintegrating intrigue, puts the matter on a different footing. The social situation conduced to fearfulness. As an account of the psychology of the natural man his theory is unsound. As a report of contemporary social conditions there is much to be said for it.
Something of the same sort may be said regarding the emphasis of eighteenth century moralists upon benevolence as the inclusive moral spring to action, an emphasis represented in the nineteenth century by Comte's exaltation of altruism. The load was excessive. But it testifies to the growth of a new philanthropic spirit. With the breaking down of feudal barriers and a consequent mingling of persons previously divided, a sense of responsibility for the happiness of others, for the mitigation of misery, grew up. Conditions were not ripe for its translation into political action. Hence the importance attached to the private disposition of voluntary benevolence.
If we venture into more ancient history, Plato's threefold division of the human soul into a rational element, a spirited active one, and an appetitive one, aiming at increase or gain, is immensely illuminating. As is well known, Plato said that society is the human soul writ large. In society he found three classes: the philosophic and scientific, the soldier-citizenry, and the traders and artisans. Hence the generalization as to the three dominating forces in human nature. Read the other way around, we perceive that trade in his days appealed especially to concupiscence, citizenship to a generous élan of self-forgetting loyalty, and scientific study to a disinterested love of wisdom that seemed to be monopolized by a small isolated group. The distinctions were not in truth projected from the breast of the natural individual into society, but they were cultivated in classes of individuals by force of social custom and expectation.
Now the prestige that once attached to the "instinct" of self-love has not wholly vanished. The case is still worth examination. In its "scientific" form, start was taken from an alleged instinct of self-preservation, characteristic of man as well as of other animals. From this seemingly innocuous assumption, a mythological psychology burgeoned. Animals, including man, certainly perform many acts whose consequence is to protect and preserve life. If their acts did not upon the whole have this tendency, neither the individual or the species would long endure. The acts that spring from life also in the main conserve life. Such is the undoubted fact. What does the statement amount to? Simply the truism that life is life, that life is a continuing activity as long as it is life at all. But the self-love school converted the fact that life tends to maintain life into a separate and special force which somehow lies back of life and accounts for its various acts. An animal exhibits in its life-activity a multitude of acts of breathing, digesting, secreting, excreting, attack, defense, search for food, etc., a multitude of specific responses to specific stimulations of the environment. But mythology comes in and attributes them all to a nisus for self-preservation. Thence it is but a step to the idea that all conscious acts are prompted by self-love. This premiss is then elaborated in ingenious schemes, often amusing when animated by a cynical knowledge of the "world," tedious when of a would-be logical nature, to prove that every act of man including his apparent generosities is a variation played on the theme of self-interest.